Bram's Blog

Good luck trying to process what's happening to you at the moment, cartoon caricature The past couple of months (as you've probably guessed from my rapid flip-flops and general emotional instability) have been very intriguing to me. Severely painful and confusing to the point of psychosis, but when I try to look at it objectively, withholding judgement of the feelings, what I realize is that my brain cannot process the information it is taking in fast enough to match the rate that information is flowing in. And to me that's nothing if not interesting. I will attempt to explain this (the bipolar- not why I think it's interesting) through an extension of Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment. The original formulation of the thought experiment is this: imagine you are trapped in a room (but don't have any desire to escape for some reason). There are two slots in the wall. Through one of the slots you are given letters (as in pieces of pape...

I've been writing a lot about identities that are partially related to my core identity, but I had an experience today that inspired me to write a post about psychosis, which is a story I feel much more qualified to tell. If you're curious about my thoughts on why psychosis happens, I offer a potential explanation here:  https://bramsfunblog.blogspot.com/2018/05/pyschosis-narratives-and-human.html.   "Listen to this voice" "Don't listen to that voice" "How about this one?" This blog is not intended to offer an explanation. Instead, I wanted to report on the subjective experience as I percieved it in hopes that if you have the same thing I'll be able to convince more people that they are, in fact, psychotic ;) It started off as a not normal day traveling in the north of England with my family. Everything was fine. I started talking to my brother about a project he was working on and gradually got more and more excited. Everywhere I ...

Edit: My good friend Noah Tolson pointed out to me that my usage of Dharma was incorrect. In Buddhism, dharma refers to a sense of law and order. The correct word is Dukkha to describe suffering from attachment. The blog has been updated with the correct usage :) My first ever sequel blog! If you haven't read the first post, you likely won't understand what I'm saying (which might be entertaining, so go ahead). If you want to though, here is the first post: https://bramsfunblog.blogspot.com/2018/06/why-im-satanist.html How many beers do you think they had to drink before this seemed like a good idea? In the blog, I claimed an identity as a Satanist. But through the ensuing chastisement (luckily all in a generous spirit), I've realized that wasn't actually as useful as I thought it was. There are things I'm glad to have said. I am sympathetic to the character of Satan; I do think there seem to be problems with God and Jesus that make labeling myself as a...

We're right in it now: philosophy- that guilded and crushingly-serious domain of white men in togas (and now hipsters in over-priced coffee shops). Before you shutter and decide to pass this post up in favor of dank memes, though, let me promise you I'll still try (and fail) to make you laugh. You'll just have to do some thinking as well ;) Before we can even start, we've got to talk about both aesthetics and Existentialism. A chef has to understand its ingredients before it (notice the emphatic "it" instead of either "he" or "she"- it could be an animal doing the cheffing) can mix them together into something not quite as tasty as either, which is what I intend to do. Simone de Beauvoir- the face of existentialism and one hell of an aesthetically-appealing badass. I call this look "staring down both the void of your own radical freedom and the patriarchy at the same time and showing Sartre up" So what is aesthetics? G...

I don't want this to be a controversial post, but I'm aware that it will be taken as one. By identifying myself as a satanist, I need to be careful, because there are some aspects of Satanism that I do not identify with, so I don't want to be misconstrued and I also don't want to misrepresent the position of other Satanists. This is a blog post about my own personal interpretation of what it means to dawn the pentagram and call myself a Satanist. When you first hear the word Satanism, what comes to mind? If you're like most people you probably think of child sacrafice, malice, and evil. I imagine you picture the most perfect thing imaginable and then take the opposite of it. But what if I told you there was far more to this label than that? What if I could convince you that a compassionate, intelligent person could (and in my opinion should) identify as a Satanist? I imagine that would be incredibly traumatic for you if you've clung your whole life to a lovi...

If only they had that shit in my size I would be the fucking king bee They say that to truly understand another person you need to walk a mile in their shoes. Unfortunately, as I've been forced to realize, I can't fit into most women's shoes, so I guess the feminine will just be an eternal mystery (it's places like this that I am cripplingly aware of how much I need emojis to communicate, but they are not available on this blog platform. So for my sake, let's imagine that the word "spib" means the same thing as that one awkward emoji face with the sweat dripping down the forehead). Spib But luckily whoever invented that saying didn't literally mean that you have to wear another person's shoes to understand them. What they actually meant was that you have to go through the same things that they do on a daily basis. Unfortunately, that's also not possible. You can never go through exactly what another person goes through, so I guess we...

A quality fluffer doing you a cute Depression is like a fart in an elevator- it's a silent, smelly, mysterious force that affects most people and yet no one knows how to talk about it. Where did it come from and why is it here? Is it just that burrito you had for lunch? (and here's where the simile breaks down, but at least I tried). Jokes aside, depression is a very important issue that affects all of our lives. And hand in hand with depression is the issue of suicide ("gasp, he talked about suicide. People aren't supposed to talk about that"). Suicide is starting to get a lot more attention as a result of the high-profile celebrity suicides that are occurring with disturbing frequency. Kate Spade. Anthony Bourdain. Jesus Christ (sorry, couldn't resist the low-hanging fruit). And the problem with both depression and suicide is that we aren't talking about them in healthy ways. Because every time we avoid talking about this for the sake of not maki...

The smile says: "I ain't going to take your restrictive ideas on morality" Most people remember where they were when they first heard of Ayn Rand. I was a chipper, starry-eyed 16-year-old (who was deeply existentially depressed, but that's neither here nor there). Needless to say, coming from a thoroughly Judeo-Christian background I found her ideas challenging. If I recall correctly, her idea of objectivism actually caused a mental breakdown. I only got like 200 pages into "Atlas Shrugged" before I decided I just couldn't be bothered anymore (which I think is as far as anyone gets in that monstrously-long book) after which all of my knowledge of Ayn Rand came from second-hand sources (blogs, wikipedia, what have you...). But in the time since, I've developed something of a strong, suspicious respect for her ideas and for her deceptively-alluring smile. So what was it about Ayn Rand that so thoroughly shook me? What is Randian Objectivism and ...